The bilingualism of the Mexican indigenous zones emanates from an ancestral conflict of power and subjection, which makes it a complex sociolinguistic phenomenon and also one of difficult definition. In Porque hablar dos idiomas… es como saber más. Sistemas comunicativos bilingües ante el México plural, Gabriela Coronado Suzán, together with a group of collaborators, evidences the magnitude and versatility of this problem of languages in contact which, in the Mexican linguistic reality, acquires peculiar and even unique distinctive traits.

The dual structure of the book –intertwinement of theory and methodology- allows us to gradually penetrate in the interstices of Mexican bilingualism. When we incursion in the different indigenous communities and regions where the native language may be dying, or in others, where it may surprisingly represent certain pressure opposite Spanish, we discover a multifaceted bilingualism related to the very historical process of the various indigenous ethnic groups.

Coronado searches for coherent scaffolds that respond to the reality of this complex social process and that reveal its intrinsic characteristics. In fact, in “Hacia una comprensión del bilingüismo” (Towards an understanding of bilingualism), first part of the book, the author employs three chapters for the analysis of all the problems and phenomena that are inherent to the construction of model of anthropological interpretation of the Mexican linguistic diversity. The subject of the first chapter is the making of an individual ethnography that allows the description of different sociocommunicative spaces, where the conflictive interaction originates. In it, Coronado analyzes community and regional communicative spaces; different fields of vital interaction where the indigenous languages expand or are displaced in an intricate mechanism of usage strategies.

In the interaction between community and region, Coronado builds her own “typology for bilingual diversity”, center of the second chapter and vital contribution of the book. Based on the concept of functionality as a dynamic and conflictive phenomenon (which is not stable, like the one proposed by Fishman), Coronado introduces levels: socialization, type of interlocutor, (age and gender) and sociocommunicative events which, when interacting with one another, produce four fundamental options in the confrontation of languages: from the predominance of the indigenous language to the absolute supremacy of Spanish, passing by an equitability of the two languages in contact. However, all this is subjected to the precise communicative needs of the situation and of the significant links that -for its functioning- are generated within the social group. Precisely, in the third chapter, “Multicausalidad del comportamiento bilingüe” (Multiple causes of bilingual behavior), Coronado analyzes and interprets the different extralinguistic factors that have a repercussion on the various sociolinguistic behaviors and lead to the reproduction of the indigenous languages or to the appropriation of Spanish in these situations of conflictive bilingualism. The answer to this paradoxical situation, according to Coronado, is in the creative power and the capacity of action of the indigenous groups, which allow their functioning within a process of domination and contravene the attempts towards linguistic homogenization.

In the second part of the book “Acercamientos varios a la realidad” (Different approaches to reality), also divided in three chapters, Gabriela Coronado, together with Óscar Mota, María Teresa Ramos and Juan Briseño, focuses on the methodological aspects that report and systematize the results of a vast field work performed for a period of years, since 1986, when the “Questionnaire of usage of indigenous languages” was applied in different communities.

Nine Mexican indigenous languages (Mixe, Mixteco, Purépecha, Mazateco, Chinanteco, Ñahñú, Náhuatl, Popoluca and Totonaco), all of which are bearers of particular views of the world, are analyzed in different fields: school, church, health center, market; and in different spaces of individual and collective interaction: the tequio, morning work, rituals, feasts.

In “Andando comunidades” (Traveling through communities) we discover the different dynamics of the indigenous languages under bilingual conditions and we also discover the diversity of practices, functions and activities that take place from one community to another. While in certain communities there is a passive submission to Spanish, in others there is a revitalization of the vernacular; and in some others, there is a balanced, strategic, measured use of both languages.

Language permeates everything, but the attitudes of the speakers manipulate it in different ways. The Indian chooses when and how to speak his/her own language and where and with whom to speak Spanish. There might be a conscious displacement of the vernacular facing Spanish, as in the case of Ñahnú; or Spanish might be chosen as an instrumental resource to continue strengthening the indigenous language, as shown by the results on the Mixe area. Then, the title of the book Porque [para los indígenas] hablar dos idiomas… es como saber más (Because [for the Indians] speaking two languages… is like knowing more) makes sense. Therefore, bilingualism does not emerge from political will, but from an assumed and conscious choice by the part of the Indians.

In this way, Coronado reveals a Hydra that the official and the academic discourses have tried to minimize –in most cases-, by reducing it to a simple definition of “cohabitation of two languages”. In this book, the myth of homogeneity of the indigenous groups and, consequently, of their languages, is pulled down. The book is a fresh and controversial view offered to us, in which the metaphor of Babel –multiplicity of tongues-, synonym of punishment, transforms into Pentecost –the gift of tongues-: redemption.

Mexican bilingualism is a true reflection of a different reality in which languages and speakers are necessarily imbricated and where the creativity of the Mexican indigenous groups is rescued. On the other hand, Coronado shows a peculiar stage of development of Mexican Linguistics, in which foreign models are abandoned in order to respond to a surprising reality that needs to be analyzed using our own words and the explanations that emerge from the Mexican phenomenon.

This book opens new paths. Hopefully some of them will be traveled; hopefully this model will be tested in other linguistic communities of a different ethnic composition, to try to involve every part of the overwhelming Mexican linguistic richness.

Rebeca Barriga Villanueva. El Colegio de México.
English translation by Denisse Piñera Palacios.